


Monte Carlo Nights

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Caper Fic, Developing Friendships, Gen, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 03:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11050266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Ten years after the war, Jack is in Monte Carlo to pick up a package from a CIA courier. So what on earth is Ana Jarvis doing there ...?





	Monte Carlo Nights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MelyndaR](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelyndaR/gifts).



This SHIELD gig was pretty swell at times, Jack thought, surveying the casino floor as he fastened the cufflinks of his white tux. 

... and then, because life enjoyed laughing at him, he winced as his hand slipped and he failed to keep the pinky and ring finger on his right hand straight, tweaking the healing bones. They were taped together as discreetly as possible, and he'd mainly been keeping his hand in his pocket. If anyone noticed, he laughed it off as a horseback riding injury. "Clumsy mare slipped on wet grass and threw me right over her head. Two seconds of excitement and a nice nurse fussing over me at the club, so I guess I can't complain. Coulda broke my neck, after all."

The horseback riding story would also explain any additional bruises anyone happened to notice -- if he hiked up the sleeve a little too high so they could see the healing skin around his wrists, for example. His face was undamaged; he was fairly sure his interrogators had been saving that fun for later, which luckily they hadn't got around to, since SHIELD finally goddamn got there, three days late.

Peggy would never admit it, of course, not the indomitable Director Carter ... but he had a feeling that this assignment was an oblique apology for the last one. He was still on light duty while he recovered, and had expected desk duty or maybe getting stuck as ambassadorial liaison to one of SHIELD's overseas branch offices -- not a difficult assignment, but agonizingly dull. Instead he'd gotten a full week in Monte Carlo, all expenses paid, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous while he waited to pick up a package of intel from a CIA courier as part of one of SHIELD's joint operations with other alphabet agencies.

It was the cushiest of cushy assignments. Literally all he had to do for the entire week was drink, gamble (not _too_ much of that, though less for the sake of SHIELD's budget than for the anticipation of Peggy's death glare if he tried to expense his gambling losses), flirt with well-heeled European women in jewels and furs, and at some point during that week, do the handoff with a CIA agent nicknamed Bluebird. Woman agent, according to Peggy, and that was all she knew either.

Jack smiled slightly as he picked up a fresh drink at the bar and circulated. There was a time in his life when he would have said Peggy was having a bad influence on other agencies. But he'd known her for ten years at this point, and ... well ... if the CIA was recruiting women in the Margaret Carter style of spycraft, he figured the good ol' US of A could have worse people representing its interests overseas.

Also, he had every intention of asking for a dance. It wasn't often that he got to dance with a lady spy who wasn't trying to stab him in the back.

Bluebird might show up at any point during the week, so he kept his eyes open for the sign he'd been told to look for, a white rose and a fake bluebird on her hat. Not that there was any lack of hats, flowers, and other kinds of glitter to distract the eye. They were a beautiful crowd here in Monte Carlo, and he slipped among them with ease.

The thought occurred to him that this was the sort of thing ten-years-younger Jack Thompson thought he'd been born for. When he'd pictured his future, this was exactly how he'd pictured it ... at least to all outward appearances.

It was only under the skin that everything was different.

And the funny thing was how quickly the glitter and beauty began to pale. He had really enjoyed the first couple of days, aside from not having the energy to stay out 'til all hours. Now, though ... he smiled to himself behind his drink. He found himself looking forward to getting back Stateside for a little while when this assignment wrapped up. See what the Carter-Sousas were up to these days. He wouldn't be surprised if Peggy was pregnant again; she hadn't come along on the rescue mission that had pulled him out of that East German prison cell, and he had a feeling there were extenuating circumstances. Maybe this time he would manage to succeed in his campaign to get them to name it after him. (Okay, so "It's a girl, Jack" was a pretty good excuse. BUT STILL.)

Actually, thinking about that was making him feel ... okay, it wasn't that he didn't want to be here exactly -- he couldn't have asked for a better place to recuperate, definitely better than a DC winter by a long shot -- but the casino crowd really wasn't holding his attention tonight. He thought he might just head back to his hotel room, take a painkiller (he wasn't hurting a lot, but a few things were really starting to ache after being on his feet for a few hours, especially his ribs and the ankle that had never really recovered from that _other_ mission back in '52), and read a book until he fell asleep.

_Face it, Thompson, you're getting old ..._

Wait. Had that been a flash of white and blue across the room?

For a moment he lost sight of what he'd seen over by the baccarat tables, a particularly ostentatious hat with a cluster of white flowers on it, but then he glimpsed it heading across the floor. White flowers, blue dot. Below the hat, he glimpsed pale shoulders above a sweeping red dress. 

That might be her.

Suddenly he wasn't tired at all, fresh energy flooding him. Jack adjusted the purple carnation in his buttonhole -- his countersign to Bluebird's roses and birds -- and headed after her.

The woman appeared and disappeared in the crowd as Jack moved through it, but she wasn't hard to locate; she was drifting slowly from one game to another, the picture of a bored socialite taking in the sights -- or a spy giving another spy time to locate her while never staying in one place for too long. He finally managed to approach her from the back as she stood watching a poker game with one languid hand curled around the stem of a glass of white wine. Her crimson dress dipped low in the back, and Jack appreciated the sight for a moment -- also taking the opportunity to get a good look at her hat; damned if he knew whether that was a bluebird or not, but it was definitely a bird, and it was blue. Good enough for him.

"Do you play?" he murmured as he sidled up to her.

The correct response was "I tried it once, but it bored me." She made a sound, shaping the beginnings of an answer as she turned to him -- but then she went silent, and Jack found himself confronting a pair of very wide gray-green eyes.

This woman wasn't Bluebird.

This woman was Ana Jarvis.

For a moment all Jack could do was stare at her. She seemed equally flummoxed: speechless, in fact. 

What in hell was Jarvis's wife doing here?

But the obvious answer came to him immediately. Of _course_ Stark was here in Monte Carlo; it was exactly his kind of scene. And of course Stark wouldn't go anywhere without his favorite butler in tow. It was just Jack's stupid bad luck that they had to show up right in the middle of _his_ assignment. Couldn't they have waited one more week?

"Where is --" he began, but Mrs. Jarvis quickly raised a finger and touched it to his lips. Startled and annoyed, Jack started to speak around it, but not before she had a chance to speak.

"I tried it once," she said. "But it bored me."

Now it was with a deeper and more profound surprise that he went quiet. She was looking at him now with the oddest expression, her eyes crinkled ever so slightly around the edges, a slight trace of a smile on her scarlet-painted mouth.

Those were the right words. But ... what ... _how ..._?

A slow, cold anger grew in him. What was she playing at? Worse, what was _Peggy_ playing at?

"Let's go talk about poker," Jack murmured fiercely, planting a hand in the small of her back, and whisked her off. She made a tiny, surprised squeaking sound as he hustled her off. Jack had to grit his teeth against making a sound of his own; he'd forgotten not to use his right hand for that.

There weren't many options for a private conversation in a place like this. He settled for a quiet alcove along the wall, out of the flow of traffic and partly hidden behind a large potted fern. "What's your game?" he demanded in a tense whisper.

"Game?" she inquired, eyes wide.

"Yes, what do you think you're doing? You have to have guessed I'm --" He leaned forward so he could whisper beyond all possibility of being overheard. "-- I'm on a case here. I don't know what you know, and I don't _care_ what you know. I need you to butt out of my case right now."

"But if I do that," she whispered back, "how can I possibly give you the package I have for you?"

The worst part was that she was smiling, and Jack had a steep sinking sensation. He was going to _strangle_ Peggy the next time he saw her.

"Don't tell me Peggy recruited you too." Damn that woman. It just figured.

"Miss Carter? No." Ana shook her head, but she was looking around as she spoke, the wary look of a woman alert for eavesdroppers, though not afraid.

It was slowly starting to sink in that if she actually _was_ Jack's contact, this wasn't the first time she'd done something like this. She was too cool, too professional.

"Is Jarvis here?" Jack demanded, keeping his voice pitched for her ears alone. "Stark?"

"No. Only me. My package for you, it is in my hotel room."

"They told me I'd be meeting a CIA agent." And he didn't want to acknowledge, even to himself, the tiny, painful twinge in his chest that had nothing to do with cracked ribs. Peggy had lied to him.

Ana hesitated before giving a very small nod. "I am."

"You're what?"

"I am CIA."

He stared at her. Stared and stared, as if by looking he could make her stop being Jarvis's wife -- the warm, friendly woman who had brought him extra pillows and cups of tea when he'd been recuperating from his shooting at the Stark mansion -- and somehow see her as ... what? A spy? Cold, hard, dangerous?

"Since when?" he whispered.

"Since ... oh ..." She set her glass of wine delicately on a decorative molding and took his arm. At the same time, she swept off her hat and tucked it neatly under the fronds of the fern. "You had best lose that," she murmured, nodding to the carnation in his buttonhole, and cut her eyes pointedly at the casino floor.

Jack looked quickly where she was looking. Two heavyset men, tuxedos straining across their broad shoulders and every line of their bodies indicating Trouble with a capital "T", were pushing their way through the crowd. He dropped the purple carnation into the fern's pot.

"Looking for us?"

"I'd rather not find out." Ana steered him away from the fern by her grip on his arm, head bent close and cheerful smile pasted on her scarlet lips. Now that the hat was off, her head looked small and sleek with all her red hair pinned up.

"Hair's gonna give you away, if they have your description," he murmured.

"The hat will give me away faster," she pointed out. "It's how you found me, after all."

"Mmm." He had to stifle a grimace; the arm she was holding had been both bruised and burnt, not to mention stretched in an unnatural direction at the joints, and she had a very firm grip. To take his mind off the pain, and the possibility of more pain in his immediate future, he murmured, "Leave a trail, did you?"

"Me?" she inquired. "I should ask you the same thing."

Despite his annoyance and the pain in his arm and various other parts of him as she steered him toward the door of the gambling salon, Jack had to admire her finesse. She was very aware of her surroundings; every time one of the thugs looked in their direction, she turned her face away from them, leaning into Jack's shoulder.

This _definitely_ was not her first assignment.

Jack tipped his head towards hers, putting on his own smile as he joined her in the outward charade of a man and woman enjoying each other's playful flirtations. "How long have you been in the game?" he murmured through the smile.

A brief pause, then, "Since the war."

"What?" Jack whispered, unable to keep the shock from freezing his smile into a grimace.

"Not the CIA, of course. It didn't exist then."

"Well, no, but ... erk!"

As soon as they reached the door of the gambling salon, Ana jinked suddenly sideways down the hall, propelling Jack by the arm. He had to stifle a yelp at the wrench to his shoulder and ribs.

But he could see why. There were more goons lurking in the direction of the exit, who were now drifting purposefully in their direction, blocking them from being able to leave.

The Monte Carlo Casino looked more like a palace than a gambling den. He and Ana walked very briskly down the huge central gallery, dodging around knots of champagne-sipping rich people. There wasn't much their enemies could do in here, Jack told himself. The casino had excellent security. But they could be cornered, and security couldn't be everywhere. The sick awareness of being trapped rose in his throat.

But there was more than one way out. "See anyone shady-looking out there?" he murmured, jerking his head toward the exit to the terrace and, beyond it, the casino's grounds and gardens.

"I don't see as we have a choice, do you?"

They were both slightly out of breath when they reached the doors. One of the tuxedo-clad security guards held up a hand and moved slightly to block them. _Shit,_ Jack thought.

"Problem?" the guard inquired softly in accented English.

"Angry husband," Jack explained, hooking his hand through Ana's arm -- _ow,_ wrong hand again. 

Ana smiled coyly and leaned on Jack's shoulder. "Please don't tell anyone you saw a red-haired woman come this way?"

Jack wasn't sure if her simpering had any effect, but they were let through with amused looks -- no doubt they were very far from the first cheating couple to pass through these doors. They crossed the lamplit terrace and hurried down the steps into the gardens.

"What is wrong with your arm?" Ana asked quietly.

"Nothing," Jack said, jerking it away. Though lampposts lit the pathways, the shadows seemed very dark, their voices too loud. There were few people here. Good place for an ambush. They needed to get back onto the street. "I'm at the Hôtel de Paris. You?"

"Hmph, SHIELD must have a better budget than the CIA. They're putting me up at a hotel on the Rue Des Roses. It's a bit of a walk."

"Mine's just across the square, by the casino. We can regroup there --"

The brightly lit avenue was just in front of them. As they hurried out of the gardens past the casino's security, headlights went on in a row of parked cars across the street. A sleek black car pulled out and did a tight U-turn.

"Who the heck did you piss off?" Jack panted as they dashed across the street before the car could get properly oriented on them. There were more gardens over here. At least their pursuers would have to go on foot. _Or drive around and cut us off ..._

"What makes you think it was me?" Ana retorted archly, easily outdistancing him despite the heels she was wearing. He didn't want to explain that he would have been able to move a lot faster if not for the combination of difficulty breathing (ribs) and difficulty running (ankle).

This mission really was not supposed to be strenuous. He was going to have words with Peggy the next time he saw her.

Between palm trees and ornamental ponds, Jack pulled up short and caught Ana's arm, remembering to use his uninjured hand this time. "Change of plans. Forget the hotel. With them following us this closely, there's no way to get there without being spotted; we'd be trapped." Goodbye, clean underwear; goodbye, toothbrush. At least he'd been doing this long enough to be confident he hadn't left anything behind that would give him away. His passport was in his pocket. "Where did you say your hotel was?"

Ana shook her head, her hair a bright flash under the glimmer of nearby lampposts. "Unsafe. As we don't know which of us they're after, either hotel might be compromised." She gave him a small push. "We mustn't stop long."

As they legged it across another street, Jack couldn't help asking, "Isn't the package in your hotel room?"

"I may have been less than honest about that."

"Well, where is it?" Jack demanded.

"In my underwear," she said, scrupulously looking ahead rather than at him.

Great. Somehow, word of this was going to get back to Jarvis, and then he was going to end up getting punched by a butler. Except ... wait ...

"Are you actually married to Jarvis, or is that part of your cover?"

Without breaking stride, Ana whacked him in the arm, hard. Whether by chance or design, she managed to get him right on the girdle of bruises and cigarette burns ringing his upper arm beneath the sleeve of his white tux. _Ow._

"My marriage," she said acidly, "is not fake."

"Didn't mean to suggest it was. Jeez." He resisted the urge to rub his arm as he stumbled to a halt, watching the ebb and flow of valet-parked automobiles in front of the hotels. "Hey, I have an idea."

A few minutes later, they peeled away in a gleaming red Alfa Romeo, Jack at the wheel, feeling good about himself. They hadn't even had to steal it. All he'd had to do was time it perfectly so he could swoop in and accept the keys from a gray-haired Italian with a fur-coated woman on his arm, while the actual valets were busy with other vehicles. Guy had even tipped him a few francs. Ana had waited behind, nervously looking around as she half-hid behind an ornamental planter. Jack slowed to a near-stop just long enough for her to hop in. 

His mood was picking up. One or the other of them had obviously been compromised, but he felt much safer with wheels and a fast engine to get him wherever he needed to go.

"Hey, see what's in the glove box, in case anybody stops us. There's no border security between Monaco and France, but we still want to make sure there's nothing to point to the car as stolen."

"We should switch vehicles as soon as possible, anyway. We may have been seen." She rummaged inside the glove box. "In case we do need to show papers, I am here as Gizi Meszaros, by the way, so please be sure to call me Gizi. And you are?"

"Just Jack Thompson. I'm here as me."

"Aha," she said. "Perhaps that explains how we have been compromised."

"What? It's a common name! And I didn't come directly here; I've been to England in the meantime." In a hospital in England, to be precise, where he'd had to endure Sousa hovering and Peggy doing the best impression of hovering she was capable of from an ocean away. "What about you? Any chance you were followed from wherever you started out?"

"I suppose it is always possible, but I am very careful." 

He noticed she didn't respond to his fishing for the actual nature of her mission. The only thing he knew about the intel that he was supposed to pick up was that it had been smuggled out from behind the Iron Curtain by a CIA contact. Microfilm and such.

Speaking of which ...

"You wanna do the package handoff now or later?"

"Given its location," Ana said with a trace of a red-tinted smile, "I would very much prefer to wait until we can stop so that I might adjust my undergarments."

She had a point; Jack could feel himself blushing. It didn't help that, between the bright red lipstick and her bizarrely devil-may-care attitude, she was really reminding him of Peggy right now.

"Since we've got a bit of a drive ahead of us, we may as well talk. Have you really been with the CIA the whole time I've known you?"

Ana hesitated. "I helped collect information for the Allies during the war. Afterwards, I planned to settle down with Edwin, but ..."

"Hard to get out of the game, right?"

"I must say so. And just as during the war, my travels with Mr. Stark and Edwin are a good cover for my other activities. Mainly I convey messages or packages, such as this one."

Jack wondered for a moment why Ana seemed to have found it easier than Peggy had, to slip into a postwar life as a spy. But no, he thought he might know why. Ana, unlike Peggy, seemed to be happy to play to what the agency no doubt considered her strengths. She made an inconspicuous courier because no one would suspect a woman in such a role. Peggy would not have been content with that.

"What's your exit strategy after all this?" The Alfa Romeo was a pleasure to drive, navigating the winding, hilly roads outside Monaco like a dream. He was still undecided about whether to drive to Nice and get on a boat, or head north toward Paris. He didn't like the idea of being trapped on a vessel in the Mediterranean, depending on who was after them, but Ana was right; if they kept driving, they needed to swap cars soon.

"My exit? Similar to yours, I expect. After another day or two in Monaco, I would have booked passage on a ship and sailed to Corsica, where Mr. Stark and Edwin are currently in residence at Mr. Stark's island estate."

"Ah, Howard and the sainted Mr. Jarvis. What'd you tell 'em about this little jaunt, anyway?" Jack asked, glancing over at her. She was redoing the pins in her hair by feel, tucking up strands that had gone astray. "I doubt if _Edwin_ knows you're playing socialite in Monaco. Or is this a husband-wife team-up? Nick and Nora of the CIA set?"

It was a shot in the dark that Jarvis didn't know, and he couldn't help smiling briefly when she said, after a hesitation, "As far as Edwin knows, I am visiting an old friend of my mother's in the south of France, since we were nearby. Of course he would not begrudge me going on such an errand."

"Of course not," Jack said dryly. At the same time he wondered why he couldn't help prying at her about it. Find a weakness, try to put a claw in ... it was a habit, and one he didn't admire in himself. So what if she was lying to her husband. Wasn't like it was any business of his. Maybe it was retaliation for the fact that he'd never even suspected that she wasn't the pretty little housewife she feigned to be. She'd fooled him. Fooled all of them.

"Better, then, to live the life you do, Agent Thompson?" she asked with a sting in her voice. "No wife and children, only the job. No one to notice if you should go missing. No one to weep."

"Touché," Jack said, very carefully not thinking about a mission gone wrong in East Germany, about three days waiting for extraction. She definitely had claws, too. "Also, if I'm calling you Gizi, you might not want to call me Agent, at least not in public. So what I'm thinking is, we head toward Nice and --"

"Look out behind you," Ana interrupted sharply.

There were headlights closing fast in the rear-view mirror. "Damn," Jack muttered. He had a few seconds to decide whether to play innocent motorist, or pour on the gas and outrun them. It all depended on whether they had a description of the car or not. 

But in those few seconds, the other car took the question out of his hands, coming up with reckless speed on his rear bumper. He started to accelerate, but not fast enough, as the other vehicle drew along side and suddenly closed the gap.

"Hang on," Jack snapped at Ana. He closed his hands hard on the steering wheel, broken fingers be damned, and slammed his foot on the accelerator.

The impact was a glancing one, rocking the car as they fishtailed away; the other driver hadn't counted on their sudden burst of speed. Jack whipped around a curve, barely maintaining control of the car. The other car's headlights were right on his tailpipe.

"Got any ideas, I'd love to hear them!"

Ana shook her head. "Are you armed?"

"You kidding? Can't get anything past casino security." He didn't even have a gun in his hotel room. No point, since he'd spent most of his time in the casino anyway, and there was too much risk of a maid finding it and blowing up his cover of Jack Thompson, casual playboy.

"Same, I fear," she said grimly.

A straight stretch of road lay ahead of them. Jack poured on the speed and was rewarded with the other car's headlights dwindling behind him. His car was faster, but he'd never driven these roads before. He didn't know what lay ahead.

Also, it wasn't easy driving at racing-car speeds with two broken fingers, some messed-up ribs, and an ankle that was increasingly feeling like it was about to give way. He'd gotten to the point where he was feeling reasonably okay most of the time, especially after a couple glasses of bourbon and a handful of phenacetin, but a foot chase followed by a car chase was starting to wear on him.

"You got any ideas over there, let me hear 'em."

"Put some distance between us and them, then abandon the car?" Ana suggested, glancing back at the headlights behind them. The road curved again in a hairpin turn; they whipped around it and the headlights vanished, but reappeared a moment later.

Jack's ankle protested at the idea of running on it. Not that driving was much better. "Don't know if we can get enough of a head start to improve our situation."

"Split up, then? You drop me off and go on ahead. You can lead them off while I --"

"No."

She gave a soft laugh. "I assure you I can take care of myself, Agent Thompson."

"Ain't arguing, more just thinking there's no point. You'd be stuck in party clothes on a highway, and I'd still have these jerks on my tail. What are you gonna do, hitch a ride back to Monaco?"

They were on a long series of switchbacks now, sloping down; he glimpsed glittering lights along the shore and the softly luminescent sea to their left. And, as he'd been afraid of, the other car was gaining on them. Their pursuers were either more familiar with the road, or simply had the advantage of using Jack's taillights to know where to brake and turn.

"Could we --" Ana began, but just then the other car put on a burst of speed and smacked their rear bumper.

They were already going faster than Jack considered entirely safe. For a terrifying instant, the car veered wildly toward the edge of the road and the plunge into the sea.

Oddly, in that moment, as he fought to control the car, he thought of Peggy. Wondered if she'd ever know what had happened to him. Would he simply vanish on a milk-run mission in the world's premiere gambling spot?

Then he had them away from the edge, but only by wildly overcorrecting. The Alfa Romeo slewed across the road, narrowly missing a collision with the other car that probably would have killed all of them, and jolted onto the steep hillside abutting the road. Two tires came off the ground and the car's low-slung undercarriage slammed into something with an impact that made Jack wince. They skidded sideways and he knew from the way the car handled that they'd blown a tire.

The other car pulled around crosswise in the road. Jack tried to turn around, pointing back uphill, but just then another set of headlights appeared. His hope that it might be a friendly motorist who would dash back to Monaco to report an accident died when the newly arrived car skidded to a stop and turned sideways, blocking them. With unfriendlies on both sides, caught between the hill and a sheer drop to the sea, they had nowhere to go.

Jack yanked the wheel and pulled to the side; the car rocked and wobbled on its blown tire. SHIELD was going to owe some fatcat a replacement car, if they ever found out about this.

If there was anyone left alive to tell them.

"Guess we get to run after all," Jack muttered. He glanced down at her feet. "Think you can run in hill country in those shoes?"

"Better than you can run on that ankle, I expect."

Damned woman had been spending too much time around Peggy.

Their one advantage, Jack thought as he gripped his door handle, was that the combination of a dark, moonless night and the harsh glow of the cars' headlights made for terrible visibility. With the headlights washing out everyone's night vision, he and Ana would be harder to see in the dark. Even that bright red dress of hers would turn black outside the headlights' glare. 

He was regretting the hell out of the white tux right now, sharp as it had looked on a dressmaker's dummy back in London.

"Go," he whispered, and they sprang from their respective sides of the car, heading into the bushes alongside the road. Behind them, Jack heard slamming car doors and yelling. Sounded like English, which added an interesting wrinkle to this whole mess. At least it wasn't the East Germans.

They scrambled through the brush and up the hill. Jack gritted his teeth -- the climb was even harder than he'd thought it would be; his ankle kept trying to fold over on him -- and planted a hand in Ana's back, pushing her on ahead of him. She turned around, reaching down to offer him a hand up when he stumbled. They were on some kind of path now, making it easier to get through the brush, but also making them dead easy to find.

"We should split up," she whispered. Below them, shouts and rustling in the bushes indicated that their pursuers were hot on their trail.

She wasn't wrong, but he found himself reluctant, partly out of what Peggy would no doubt have described as a misplaced sense of chivalry, but partly because they had more options together than apart. And wasn't that an interesting thing to realize about himself, he mused as they scrambled up the trail, helping each other over the rough parts as her impractical shoes tried to send her feet out from under her and his cracked ribs jabbed a red-hot poker into his side. As he'd been profoundly reminded in Germany, the lone-heroing thing might have its charms, but it didn't have much to recommend it compared to working as part of a team.

Flashlights stabbed suddenly down from above, and Ana pulled up short with a hiss of dismay, wrestling her skirt free of a thorny bush. Jack cursed under his breath. Assholes had circled around.

"Any chance that's a friendly goat-herder up there?" he muttered, looking around for something, _anything_ that could be repurposed as a weapon, and wishing he'd thought to check the trunk of the car for a tire iron while there was still time.

"I do not think we should be so lucky." Ana gripped a length of deadwood like a club, and passed another to Jack. Not that it was going to be much help against guns, but it was better than nothing, and in the darkness they might have a chance.

_Not again!_ a part of him screamed, as he tried to grip the makeshift club in a way that wasn't doing too much damage to his fingers. He'd just gotten _out_ of a damned torture cell, and now it looked like he was headed straight back to a different one. He'd almost rather just get shot this time.

"If anyone asks," he said, "we don't know each other. We met at the casino and I offered you a drive under the stars. That ought to hold up regardless of whether they're after me or you."

"Agreed," Ana said softly, and then their pursuers were on them from both directions. 

There was a brief scuffle that ended ingloriously when someone's fist cracked into Jack's aching ribs and he ended up facedown in the dirt, a shoe grinding into his back, trying to remember how to breathe. Nearby he heard a crack and a male grunt of pain; Ana had gotten in a couple of hits. _You go, girl._

"Settle down, little lady, or there's gonna be a bullet through the skull of your boy-toy here," a rough voice snapped from above Jack's head.

Not just English, but American accents; who the hell were these guys? Jack wondered if Ana planned to hold him to the "make like we don't know each other" plan he'd suggested, in which case this was probably curtains -- _Peggy, not to criticize, but I gotta say this is the worst milk-run mission I've ever been on --_

But Ana must have capitulated. There was a muffled feminine gasp and the heavy foot lifted from Jack's spine. After a minute or two spent figuring out how his lungs worked and spitting out a mouthful of dirt, he painfully rolled to his side so he could see what was going on. The first thing he saw was the business end of a gun pointed at his face.

"Stay down," a half-glimpsed shadow above the gun told him. "You speak English? Speak-a de English?"

"I speak-a de English just fine, Chuck," Jack snapped. Beyond Goon #1, he saw that one of the men was holding Ana while another gripped her face roughly, twisting her head toward him, and shone a flashlight into her face.

"Is that her?" one of the others asked. There were about a half dozen of them, all armed. Jack was pretty sure he didn't know any of them, from the voices at least. Every single one he'd heard speak had an American accent.

"It's her," the flashlight-wielder declared triumphantly. 

The one who must be their ringleader chuckled. "Nice job, boys." 

"So what about Boy Toy here?" Jack's captor asked. He planted a foot on Jack's hip, pressing down hard enough to hurt. Jack glared up at him and entertained cathartic fantasies about rearranging his face. "This ain't her husband, is it? Thought the husband was a limey."

"Nah, it ain't her husband," Ringleader said with a glance at Jack. "Looks like little Mrs. Jarvis is getting some on the side. Your husband should thank you, sweetie," he told Ana. "We're doing him a favor here."

Ana had gone very still; so had Jack. 

_They know who she really is._

But they didn't know who _he_ was. He could have laughed. This wasn't precisely mistaken identity, so much as a little too much of her real identity.

He raised his head in time to see Ana visibly crumple. "Oh no, oh please," she wailed. "Please don't tell Edwin, I'd be so heartbroken if he knew. What are you going to do to me?"

Jack found it amazing that they were taken in, considering they'd just watched her fight. On the other hand, if he hadn't known Peggy all these years, he might have been taken in too. He could see them relax, deeming her subdued and no threat.

"Don't worry, honey," the ringleader said, caressing her face with a blunt fingertip. "Long as Stark is willing to pay up for you, then you got nothing to worry about."

"So what about this guy?" Jack's guard asked impatiently.

"Hey, my dad's rich," Jack tried. It was technically kinda-true, aside from the part where his dad hadn't talked to him since the Vernon fiasco a decade ago. "You might be able to get a ransom for me if you want one -- ow!" The gunman casually kicked him, not too hard, but enough to send a ripple of agony through his ribs. It wasn't hard to feign being cowed into silence.

"We don't need complications," the ringleader decided. "Just the girl."

Ana met Jack's eyes, and he could see that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking.

They snapped into motion at the same time, Ana lashing out behind her at the man holding her, while Jack hooked a leg behind his guy's ankle and sent him sprawling. The gun went flying and he dived for it.

Things went a lot better with the element of surprise on their side. When the dust settled, two of the guys had bullet holes in them and the rest were groaning on the ground or out cold.

"You okay?" Jack asked Ana. His side really hurt; he'd broken out in a cold sweat and had to pant through the pain as he collected the remaining guns. He might've actually broken another rib, which would be just swell.

"Doing well, thank you." She accepted the gun Jack handed her, followed by a flashlight. "Should we contact someone, do you think?"

"Do you really want to have to explain any of this to the local authorities?"

"Hmm. No."

A few minutes later they were back at the cars. Jack had confiscated all the keys, and took a moment to move one of the two cars belonging to the goon squad off the road, parking it behind the stolen Alfa Romeo. He removed the distributor caps from both vehicles and tossed them into the backseat of the larger and nicer of the goons' cars, before he had to pause, leaning on the side of the car and breathing through a muscle spasm.

"Perhaps I should drive," Ana remarked. Having retrieved her purse from the Alfa Romeo, she was using a kerchief to wipe down the door handles and steering wheel.

Under other circumstances he might have objected, but he wasn't in the mood. Besides, he'd just seen her take down three guys, unarmed. Jack passed her the keys and got into the passenger's seat.

As they drove down the winding road to the sea at a rather more sedate pace than earlier, Ana said, "We'll be in Nice shortly. I plan to find a ship sailing to Corsica and leave in the morning."

"Yeah, guess I'll catch a ride back to England." The idea of going back to Monte Carlo to retrieve his things flitted briefly through his mind, but that would involve dealing with the mess their flight from the casino had left behind (such as a stolen car), and, no. He could buy something in Nice to replace the white tux, which looked -- accurately -- as if he'd been rolling around in the dirt in it.

Peggy was going to love the report on this. Speaking of which ...

"I think you still have something of mine."

"Oh, that's an excellent point."

Driving one-handed, she reached down the front of her bodice. Jack blinked and then tried to look anywhere but at her. Small rustles coming from the seat next to him proved equally hard to ignore, before she placed a small package in his hand, still warm from her body heat.

"Thanks," he said dryly, tucking it away inside his jacket. SHIELD better appreciate everything he went through to get this.

"It's been quite the evening, hasn't it?" Ana said, as if her own thoughts mirrored his. She stretched to take a look at her face in the rear-view mirror, lightly touching the bruise purpling under her eye.

"How are you planning to explain a fresh crop of new bruises to dear old Edwin, anyway?"

"Oh, I'll find a way." Looking at the road rather than at him, she added, "Edwin is used to me being clumsy. Walking into doors, that sort of thing. Poor dear man." There was a world of wistful longing in her voice, and he was suddenly, bitterly jealous -- not of either of them specifically, just that she had someone to go back to. Someone who'd notice and look for her if she disappeared.

But the jealousy passed as quickly as it had come, washed away by the reminder of the double life she had to lead, and the endless, careful line she had to walk. It wasn't easy, lying to those who loved you. And maybe she _had_ been lucky, after all, that it was a gang of would-be kidnappers who had recognized her in Monte Carlo and not, say, an old friend who might ask her husband, with the best intentions in the world, if he knew that his wife was in a famous casino flirting with a rake in a white tuxedo ...

"You should tell him, you know," Jack said abruptly. "Tell him the truth."

"Mmm. Learning his wife has lied to him for fifteen years ... it would be cruel, don't you think, to deal that blow?"

"More cruel than lying to him for the next fifteen years?"

She gave him a swift glance. "Well, if we're giving unwelcome advice, you should go home for awhile."

Jack barked a sharp laugh. "Haven't gone one, sweetheart. Side effect of this line of work."

"Are you quite sure about that?"

She certainly did give as good as she got. He slouched down in the seat to try to find a comfortable position that didn't aggravate his ribs too much, leaned his head against the window, and feigned sleep as they drove into the outskirts of Nice.

He was definitely looking forward to a day or two on a well-appointed cruise ship with no running in his immediately future.

Still ... when he got back to London, it didn't seem like such a bad idea to hop over to the States for awhile. Might even see about getting a permanent domestic position at SHIELD HQ rather than doing all these damn overseas jobs. He wasn't as young as he used to be.

The odds of getting beaten up again were still pretty high around the Carter-Sousas, given how Peggy's life tended to go, but at least getting the crap kicked out of him in good company beat doing it by himself.


End file.
